Sunday, September 07, 2014

The man accused of beheading a great-grandmother in her back garden is a would-be cage fighter who converted to Islam five years ago, it has emerged.

Nicholas Salvadore, 25, was charged late on Friday with the murder of 82-year-old Palmira Silva, who was hacked to death in an apparently random attack on Thursday afternoon. Mr Salvadore was also charged with assaulting a police officer.

Mrs Silva is understood to have been attacked by a suspect who had argued with his flatmates minutes earlier, prompting them to flee in terror in a car as he smashed one of its windows. The killer then beheaded two cats, ranting as he did so, before targeting Mrs Silva.

A neighbour said the suspect had told her a week ago: “The police are looking for me, but they can't find me, I'm going to hide.”Neighbours said Mr Salvadore had been living with friends a few doors down from Mrs Silva in Edmonton, north London, for several months and was well known in the area, where he was nicknamed “Fat Nick”.

An hour before Mrs Silva’s murder, Mr Salvadore had been involved in an argument at the local Nightingale Café, where he ordered a takeaway burger and left without paying.

Fatima Altun, 20, who works in the cafe, said: "I went after him and said 'You haven't paid'. He gave me the money, it was £3, but he was a bit angry about it. To me he seemed a bit depressed or upset about something."

He was also involved in a row with a local taxi firm last year. A shopkeeper in Nightingale Road said: “I don't know what the argument was about but it ended up with him breaking a window.”

Khairul Islam, 40, who runs an Internet cafe close to Mrs Silva's home, said: “He'd come over quite a lot and search the internet for things like cars. He was one of these people that just hangs around, a bit of a ruffian but never violent to me. He seemed OK, just a loafer."

Lewis Young, 24, a tattoo artist who attended the local Nightingale Academy secondary school with Mr Salvadore, said: “At school he was just a normal bloke. He has seemed pretty cool. I just can’t believe he could have done something like this.”

Mr Salvadore had ambitions to become a cage fighter, but had gone off the rails and was known locally for dealing drugs.

Another acquaintance of Mr Salvadore said: “He was having problems at work. He's just been sacked. He'd had problems with drink and drugs in the past.”

Dave Jensen, 52, a builder who once employed Mr Salvadore as a labourer, said he had converted to Islam five years ago.However he added that he had never behaved aggressively regarding his religion or beliefs.

Mr Jensen said: "Nick told me in passing he'd turned to Islam, about five years ago. But he wasn't in your face about it. He didn't try and convert others or talk about religion and politics at all.

"He worked for me off and on, labouring and clearing rubbish in houses round here.”

Police disclosed that it took almost half an hour to arrest the suspect after the first 999 call was received at 1.07pm on Thursday. A police helicopter was overhead by 1.12pm, by which time it is thought Mrs Silva was already dead, and officers on the ground “contained” the suspect as he roamed between back gardens before he was finally cornered in a house and arrested at 1.35pm.

Witnesses said two young boys were in the house where the suspect was held, and described police smashing a window so their mother could hand them to officers and then scramble clear of the house herself.

The alleged killer was shot with a Taser during his arrest, and spent Thursday night in hospital being treated for injuries sustained in a struggle with police, but was discharged on Friday morning and taken to a police station for questioning. Scotland Yard said the murder was not related to terrorism.

Jason Griffiths, 21, told how his three-year-old son Mason had been playing in the front garden with his niece, Brooke, five, just yards from where the killer struck.

He said: "It's terifying to think they could have been attacked too. The madman was running around for at least 20 minutes slashing at anything that moved with a machete. "Thank God the children were OK. My ex-partner grabbed them and got them inside.”

After arguing with his housemates and chasing them into the streets, the killer is said to have grabbed a machete and shouted: “Where are the cats?” and “The cats have stolen my lighter.”

Witnesses said he went from his own back garden into the next door garden, where he beheaded a cat before going into the street and butchering another cat. He then ran through the front door of a house that had been left open, got into the back garden and from there went into Mrs Silva’s garden.

One woman, Maame Afaidze-Hayford, 23, said: "I often see him pacing around late at night outside his flat when I got home from night shifts. I never spoke to him but I recognised his picture in the paper."

Floral tributes were laid by well-wishers at Silva’s Café, which Mrs Silva had run for decades with her late husband Domenico, and where she still helped out every day after it was taken over by younger family members.

Dave Smith, 49, a customer at Silva’s Cafe for 28 years, described Mrs Silva as a "kind and gentle" woman who was a "wonderful" cook. He added: "I'd come here for her excellent spaghetti and lasagne. It's some of the finest Italian food I've tasted. I'm angry at who did this. Prison is too good for them."

The Metropolitan Police released a statement late on Friday night confirming the charges against Mr Salvadore of murder and assault of a police officer. He is due to appear at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court in north London on Saturday.

In an article about police shootings in last Sunday’s New York Times (8/31), Michael Wines disputes the conventional wisdom about a disproportionate number of African-Americans being shot by police, saying there are no data one way or another. But Wines revives the canard about blacks being disproportionately targeted in traffic stops.

There actually is a study for that.

Throughout the 1990s, the nation was fixated on tales of jack-booted New Jersey state troopers who were stopping speeders on the turnpike just because they were black! In a 2000 primary debate, Vice President Al Gore sneered at then-New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, saying, “Racial profiling practically began in New Jersey, Senator Bradley.”

Attorney General Eric Holder recently paid tribute to the myth, claiming that when he was in college, he had been stopped “driving from New York to Washington.” He didn’t mention how fast he was going.

The story never made sense. How could the troopers tell the race of drivers in speeding cars? Did they wait until the driver rolled down his window and, if he was white, say, “Oh, sorry – have a nice day!”

But the Clinton administration was slapping consent decrees for racial profiling on police departments across the country, and the N.J. highway patrol was its prime evidence, based on a study that a child wouldn’t believe.

As is usually the case with bogus race studies, the pivotal 1993 survey compared speed stops on the New Jersey turnpike to the population of all drivers on the turnpike – not with the population of all speeders on the turnpike.

Such meaningless studies are popular on the left, where it is assumed that people of different races, genders and ethnicities will always behave identically in all respects.

If fewer women pass the physical test to become firefighters, that can only be because of sexism. If fewer blacks pass the written test – that’s racism. If fewer whites play professional basketball – no, forget that one. Sports are important. (Unlike arson or vehicular homicide.)

Nonetheless, based on the assumption that blacks speed just as much as whites – because to believe otherwise would be racist! – Temple University’s John Lamberth announced that while only 13.5 percent of drivers along a particular stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike were black, 46 percent of those stopped for speeding were black.

Racial profiling, Q.E.D.

The New York Times ran a dozen articles trumpeting the nonsense study, proclaiming it “the most thorough documentation of the contention that the police regularly pulled over black drivers.” Lamberth himself praised his research for ruling out the possibility of coincidence – and if you can’t trust Lamberth on his own study, who can you trust?

Largely on the basis of that investigation, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Robert E. Francis threw out the contraband evidence seized from 19 African-American men in traffic stops on the turnpike. New Jersey’s ninny governor, Christie Todd Whitman, pronounced her state’s troopers guilty of racial profiling and agreed to a consent decree with the Department of Justice (DOJ) that basically prohibited the troopers from doing their jobs.

Statisticians, and other people with common sense, tried to explain to liberals that human beings are not identical. Any study purporting to show that too many blacks are stopped for speeding must first determine how many speeders are black.

Being denounced as virtual Klansmen, the state troopers demanded a real study.

Confident that any new study would merely serve to confirm the troopers' racism, the DOJ and the New Jersey attorney general commissioned a statistical investigation from the Public Services Research Institute in Maryland.

The institute’s study was a spectacular thing. Using expensive monitors with high-speed cameras and radar detectors, they clocked the speeds of nearly 40,000 drivers on the relevant section of the turnpike. Three researchers then examined the photos to determine the race of the driver – without knowing whether the driver was speeding, which was defined as going more than 80 mph in 65 mph zones.

The result: No racial profiling.

Blacks constituted 25 percent of all speeders and they were 23 percent of drivers stopped for speeding. Controlling for age and gender, blacks sped at about twice the rate of whites. The racial disparity was even greater for drivers exceeding 90 mph.

Inasmuch as the study was irrefutable, Mark Posner, a lefty Clinton holdover in the Bush Justice Department, tried to block it from being released, continuously demanding more information.

But no matter how statisticians fiddled with the data, the results were identical: Blacks were twice as likely to speed as whites – and at much higher speeds. The troopers were completely vindicated.

When the study finally leaked – over Posner’s objections – he informed the press it wasn’t “valid” without articulating any actual problems with it. The attorney general of New Jersey, David Samson, nonsensically said the results didn’t matter because New Jersey had already admitted its troopers were engaging in racial profiling.

Perhaps the Times is right and there is no comprehensive study of police shootings by race. But it’s also possible that there is one, it didn’t come out as planned, so it has never seen the light of day.

In the West, it’s known as welfare fraud. In the Palestinian Territories, it’s called refugee relief. In both places, the fraud can become a way of life, seen as an entitlement that children and then grandchildren adopt. Only in the Palestinian Territories, though, does the welfare agency see its goal as putting more people on welfare and keeping them there, the better to keep “the Palestinian refugee crisis” alive.

That welfare agency is called the United Nations Relief and Aid Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA as it’s commonly known. UNRWA doesn’t focus its efforts on resettling Palestinian refugees in foreign countries that would welcome them, as might be expected of a refugee agency, or even on resettling them in their own homeland when possible.

UNRWA doesn’t even limit its efforts to what most people, and all dictionaries, would consider “refugees” — in UNRWA’s books, a refugee can be just about anyone who wants to be one. As a result, the number of Palestinian “refugees,” rather than diminishing to nothing, has grown like topsy over the decades.

UNRWA didn’t always have a create-new-refugees mission. Founded in 1949 as a temporary organization to alleviate the plight of Palestinian refugees fleeing Israel, its laudable goal included emergency relief and “the economic integration of the refugees in host countries.” By funding nearby development projects that would employ the refugees, UNRWA intended to “make them self-sufficient to a point where their names could be deleted from the relief rolls.” UNWRA initially even culled its lists of fraudulent applications, thought to number in the tens of thousands, by people using false births and duplicate registrations with variations of their names.

But UNRWA’s goals soon changed, both because Arab states generally refused to accept the Palestinian refugees that would accompany the development projects and because many refugees themselves balked at being resettled.

UNRWA then morphed from a temporary organization into a permanent “huge welfare agency, prolonging its beneficiaries’ dependence instead of giving them tools to become self-sufficient,” according a report by James G. Lindsay, a former legal advisor and general counsel for UNRWA, who lamented “the agency’s funding of food rations to large numbers of refugees who were perfectly capable of providing for their own sustenance.”

To expand its reach, UNRWA redefined who would be eligible for welfare. Its definition of “refugee,” always a politically determined moving target, changed from its early version: “a person whose normal residence had been Palestine for a minimum of two years preceding the 1948 conflict and who, as a result, had lost both his home and means of livelihood.”

UNRWA decided to treat homeless Palestinians who hadn’t fled Israel as refugees. Then less needy Palestinians who hadn’t fled Israel and hadn’t even lost their homes received refugee status — Palestinians who had always lived outside Israel could now receive refugee status, even if they lived continuously in the same home they, their fathers and grandfathers had inhabited.

Then UNRWA expanded the definition of refugee to include needy nomadic Bedouins and Arab villagers who lived in Palestine but had used fields that became part of Israel, and to include needy urban residents of Palestine who had held jobs in Israel. UNRWA also counted some needy non-Palestinians in neighbouring Lebanon. Then UNRWA dropped the requirement to be needy. Also the requirement to have continuously resided in the Palestinian territories after the 1948 war with Israel — a Palestinian who had moved to Canada, decided after a few years he preferred Gaza, and then moved back could now have his refugee status, and entitlements, reinstated. Finally, UNRWA changed the definition of refugee to include the grandchildren and great grandchildren of refugees. Not surprisingly, the number of official refugees soared, from an original official estimate of 726,000 (unofficial estimates are as low as 500,000) to more than 5 million official UNRWA refugees today.

There are few weapons as deadly as the Israeli house. When its brick and mortar are combined together, the house, whether it is one of those modest one story hilltop affairs or a five floor apartment building complete with hot and cold running water, becomes far more dangerous than anything green and glowing that comes out of the Iranian centrifuges.

Forget the cluster bomb and the mine, the poison gas shell and even tailored viruses. Iran can keep its nuclear bombs. They don't impress anyone in Europe or in Washington. Genocide is a minor matter when in the presence of the fearsome weapon of terror that is an Israeli family of four moving into a new apartment.

Sudan may have built a small mountain of African corpses, but it can't expect to command the full and undivided attention of the world until it does something truly outrageous like building a house and filling it with Jews. Since the Sudanese Jews are as gone as the Jews of Egypt, Iraq, Syria and good old Afghanistan, the chances of Bashir the Butcher pulling off that trick are rather slim.

Due to the Muslim world's shortsightedness in driving out its Jews from Cairo, Aleppo and Baghdad to Jerusalem, the ultimate weapon in international affairs is entirely controlled by the Jewish State. The Jewish State's stockpile of Jews should worry the international community far more than its hypothetical stockpiles of nuclear weapons. No one besides Israel, and possibly Saudi Arabia, cares much about the Iranian bomb. But when Israel builds a house, then the international community tears its clothes, wails, threatens to recall its ambassadors and boycott Israeli peaches.

Angry British men in red Keffiyahs hold up signs about the Holocaust in front of Jewish cosmetics stores in London. Marginalized French youth, by way of Algeria and Tunisia, hurl stones at synagogues. John Kerry interrupts a speech on the dangers of Global Warming as an aide notifies him of an even bigger threat to the world. David just made a down payment on a two bedroom in Gvaot.

You can spit on the White House carpets and steal all the gold in Greece. You can blow up anything you like and threaten anyone you will, but you had better not lift a drill near the hills from which Balaam tried and failed to curse the Jewish people. Where the old Mesopotamian warlock failed, his successors in the United Nations follow in his footsteps by cursing Israel every day of the week.

Some may think that nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapons, but as we see, time and time again, the ultimate weapon is a hammer and a fistful of nails in a Jewish hand.

Obama has yet to dig up a strategy for ISIS and can't think of what to do about Putin in the Ukraine, but there's always a final status solution strategy for Israel which involves destroying as many Jewish houses as possible and driving out the families living inside them.

Everyone has their standards. There are things that we all cannot abide. And for all the Miss America answers about ending war, hunger and people who wear plaid in public, the one thing that everyone will stand up against or sit down in opposition to is the Israeli house.

China announcing that there would be no democracy in Hong Kong, ISIS losing a battle to Iraqi forces and Jihadists occupying the US embassy in Tripoli were all minor stories thoroughly buried by the horrifying report that Israel might "seize" 988 acres of land for housing.

From the amount of media coverage you might have thought that Israel had conquered France or Kuwait instead of allocating some land the size of a farm or a ranch for housing. If Israel had only allocated 2,000 acres, then aliens could have landed in Berkeley and the news would have been buried under coverage of the houses which might be build and on which Jews might one day live.

The land being "seized" had belonged to Israel and had no prior claims against it. If Qatar had decided to finance a Muslim construction project on the site, no one would have been opposed. But there are different rules for the Jews. There have always been different rules about where the Jews can live. International law is the new ghetto. Its enforcers are diplomats and BDS.

The State Department has claimed that building houses is "counterproductive" to peace. On the other hand the Palestinian Authority's funding of terrorists never seems to be counterproductive. The legal decision about the land was made in accordance with the existing Ottoman law of the Muslim empire. But Muslim laws are only supposed to be applied when they advantage Muslims.

White House officials have in the past claimed that Netanyahu "humiliated" Obama by authorizing the building of houses. While Russia may threaten nuclear war against the United States, and Iran may play Obama for a fool, only Israel has managed to achieve official recognition for "humiliating" Obama, without even trying, proving once again that the Jewish race is so talented that it often achieves things that other peoples may only dream of without even realizing that it is doing it.

Now that Netanyahu has gone to the mattresses, literally, by authorizing new housing, the media will begin braying that Israel has humiliated Obama all over again. They say that every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. But every time an Israeli jackhammer roars, Obama stands, like that famous trash-mourning fake Indian, with a tear slowly making its way down one glistening cheek at the sight of another humiliating Israeli house.

According to the New York Times, which is never wrong, building more houses makes peace impossible. Peace, which is not in any way obstructed by rockets, suicide bombers, unilateral statehood bids and declarations of war, comes up against only one obstacle. The stout unyielding wall of the Israeli house.

You can shell Israeli houses, bomb them and break inside to massacre the people living inside, but then after all that, Israel goes and builds more of those damn things.

Hamas shoots thousands of rockets and Israel builds thousands of houses. But Israeli houses generally stay where they're built, while Hamas rockets are as likely to kill Gazans as they are to put holes in the roofs of those dastardly houses. And in the arms race between houses and rockets, the Israelis appear to be winning. And that's not good for peace.

If Israelis get the dangerous idea that they can just keep building houses and outlast all the talented rocketeers who spend their time with the Koran in front of one eye and the Anarchist's Cookbook in front of the other, what hope is there for peace?

That is why no one cares much about Hamas rockets, which mostly kill Israelis, who most reasonable people in London, Paris and Brussels think have it coming anyway, but get into a foaming lather about an Israeli house.

Killing Israelis has never been any obstacle to peace. Twenty years of killing Israelis has not dissuaded a single Israeli government from sitting down at the table to dicker with the terrorists. But an Israeli family living in a house is holding down territory that it will be harder to then cede to terrorists when the angels have blown their horns, the seas have all gone dry and peace is carried in on a golden platter by 72 virgins accompanied by their flying suicide bomber mates.

The problem is an old one. Pharaoh struggled with it. So did Hitler. And so does Hamas. What do you do when there are too many Jews living. The answer is usually obvious.

Israel's Peace Partners tried to go back to the time-honored Egyptian tradition of throwing all the Jews into the sea. But despite an entire officer corps temporarily "on leave" from the armed forces of the United Kingdom, they only got as far as half of Jerusalem, where they blew up every synagogue, and took the West Bank of Israel, or as the non-indigenous Zionist invaders with no roots in the region call it, Judea and Samaria.

Nineteen years later, Israel's Peace Partners had traded in their British officer corps for a Soviet officer corps, and lost Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, proving that when it came to killing Jews, the Communists were better at it when the Jews weren't shooting back. Ever since then the world, or those portions of it populated entirely by diplomats and the better class of journalists, has been urging Israel to give back the land to an imaginary country to be populated entirely by terrorists.

This peace plan, which has worked as well as fighting fire with gasoline, has not in any way been endangered by two decades of terror, but trembles down to its toes every time an Israeli hammer falls on an Israeli nail. Because that land must go back so that rockets can be shot from it into Israel, so that Israel can invade it and reclaim it, and then sit down for another peace process to return the land from which the rockets will be fired, which will be invaded, which will be given back... for peace.

And Israeli houses endanger this cycle of peace and violence. They endanger it by creating "facts on the ground", a piquant phrase that only seems to apply to houses with Jews. Muslim houses in no way create facts on the ground, even though they are built out of the same material and filled with people. Or perhaps they create the good kind of facts on the ground. The kind of preemption of negotiations that the professional peacemakers approve of.

But it's hard to know what exactly the peacemakers approve of, because their arguments and their definitions keep changing all the time. All that we know is that they disapprove of Israeli houses.

The United States repeatedly assured Israel that Jerusalem would in no way be endangered by the peace process. No less a personality than Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. co-sponsored three Senate resolutions urging that Jerusalem should remain Israel's undivided capital. Then like all good politicians, he was horribly offended when the Israelis actually took him at his word.

Obama gave an election speech where he declared that Jerusalem should be undivided. A day later he explained that he meant "undivided" in some spiritual sense that did not preclude it from actually being physically divided.

UN Chief Ban Ki-moon has declared Israeli houses to be an "almost fatal blow" to the peace process. It is, of course, only an "almost fatal blow" because the peace process, like Dracula, cannot be killed. Israeli houses, fearsome as they may be with their balconies and poor heating in winter, are never quite enough to kill it.

Like the monster of a horror movie, the peace process always comes back and no matter how many blows the Israeli house delivers to it, a year later there's a sequel where the Israeli house is being stalked by the peace process monster all over again.

The army of lethal Israeli houses, which may not be built for another five years, if ever, seem formidable in the black newsprint of the New York Times and in the fulminations of Guardian columnists, but their actual potency is limited to housing Jewish families and infuriating international diplomats and their media coathangers.

Europe is furious, Obama is seething, the UN is energized, and somewhere in Iraq, the Caliph of ISIS wipes the grease out of his beard and wonders what he could do to get this much attention. He briefly scribbles down some thoughts on a napkin but then dismisses them as being too implausible.

As much as it might get the world's attention, there is no way ISIS can build houses for Jews in Israel.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Background

The most beautiful woman in the world? I think she was. Yes: It's Agnetha Fältskog

A beautiful baby is king -- with blue eyes, blond hair and white skin. How incorrect can you get?

Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair

Enough said

A face of Leftist hate: Cory Booker, (D-NJ)

There really is an actress named Donna Air. She seems a pleasant enough woman, though

What feminism has wrought:

There's actually some wisdom there. The dreamy lady says she is holding out for someone who meets her standards. The other lady reasonably replies "There's nobody there". Standards can be unrealistically high and feminists have laboured mightily to make them so

Some bright spark occasionally decides that Leftism is feminine and conservatism is masculine. That totally misses the point. If true, how come the vote in American presidential elections usually shows something close to a 50/50 split between men and women? And in the 2016 Presidential election, Trump won 53 percent of white women, despite allegations focused on his past treatment of some women.

Political correctness is Fascism pretending to be manners

Political Correctness is as big a threat to free speech as Communism and Fascism. All 3 were/are socialist.

The problem with minorities is not race but culture. For instance, many American black males fit in well with the majority culture. They go to college, work legally for their living, marry and support the mother of their children, go to church, abstain from crime and are considerate towards others. Who could reasonably object to such people? It is people who subscribe to minority cultures -- black, Latino or Muslim -- who can give rise to concern. If antisocial attitudes and/or behaviour become pervasive among a group, however, policies may reasonably devised to deal with that group as a whole

Black lives DON'T matter -- to other blacks. The leading cause of death among young black males is attack by other young black males

Leftist logic: There are allegedly no distinctions between groups of humans, yet we're still supposed to celebrate diversity.

Identity politics is a form of racism

'White Privilege'. .. Oh yes. .. That was abundant in the Irish potato famines. ... And in the Scottish Highland Clearances. ...And in transportations to Australia. ... And in Workhouses. ... 'White privilege' was absolutely RIFE!

Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves. Leftist motivations are fundamentally Fascist. They want to "fundamentally transform" the lives of their fellow citizens, which is as authoritarian as you can get. We saw where it led in Russia and China. The "compassion" that Leftists parade is just a cloak for their ghastly real motivations

Occasionally I put up on this blog complaints about the privileged position of homosexuals in today's world. I look forward to the day when the pendulum swings back and homosexuals are treated as equals before the law. To a simple Leftist mind, that makes me "homophobic", even though I have no fear of any kind of homosexuals.

But I thought it might be useful for me to point out a few things. For a start, I am not unwise enough to say that some of my best friends are homosexual. None are, in fact. Though there are two homosexuals in my normal social circle whom I get on well with and whom I think well of.

Of possible relevance: My late sister was a homosexual; I loved Liberace's sense of humour and I thought that Robert Helpmann was marvellous as Don Quixote in the Nureyev ballet of that name.

One may say that the person who gets in trouble with drugs is just as dumb without them

I record on this blog many examples of negligent, inefficient and reprehensible behaviour on the part of British police. After 13 years of Labour party rule they have become highly politicized, with values that reflect the demands made on them by the political Left rather than than what the community expects of them. They have become lazy and cowardly and avoid dealing with real crime wherever possible -- preferring instead to harass normal decent people for minor infractions -- particularly offences against political correctness. They are an excellent example of the destruction that can be brought about by Leftist meddling.

I also record on this blog much social worker evil -- particularly British social worker evil. The evil is neither negligent nor random. It follows exactly the pattern you would expect from the Marxist-oriented indoctrination they get in social work school -- where the middle class is seen as the enemy and the underclass is seen as virtuous. So social workers are lightning fast to take children away from normal decent parents on the basis of of minor or imaginary infractions while turning a blind eye to gross child abuse by the underclass

The genetics of crime: I have been pointing out for some time the evidence that there is a substantial genetic element in criminality. Some people are born bad. See here, here, here, here (DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.12581) and here, for instance"

Gender is a property of words, not of people. Using it otherwise is just another politically correct distortion -- though not as pernicious as calling racial discrimination "Affirmative action"

Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!

Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.

So why do Leftists say "There is no such thing as right and wrong" when backed into a rhetorical corner? They say it because that is the predominant conclusion of analytic philosophers. And, as Keynes said: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”

Juergen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Consider two "jokes" below:

Q. "Why are Leftists always standing up for blacks and homosexuals?

A. Because for all three groups their only God is their penis"

Pretty offensive, right? So consider this one:

Q. "Why are evangelical Christians like the Taliban?

A. They are both religious fundamentalists"

The latter "joke" is not a joke at all, of course. It is a comparison routinely touted by Leftists. Both "jokes" are greatly offensive and unfair to the parties targeted but one gets a pass without question while the other would bring great wrath on the head of anyone uttering it. Why? Because political correctness is in fact just Leftist bigotry. Bigotry is unfairly favouring one or more groups of people over others -- usually justified as "truth".

One of my more amusing memories is from the time when the Soviet Union still existed and I was teaching sociology in a major Australian university. On one memorable occasion, we had a representative of the Soviet Womens' organization visit us -- a stout and heavily made-up lady of mature years. When she was ushered into our conference room, she was greeted with something like adulation by the local Marxists. In question time after her talk, however, someone asked her how homosexuals were treated in the USSR. She replied: "We don't have any. That was before the revolution". The consternation and confusion that produced among my Leftist colleagues was hilarious to behold and still lives vividly in my memory. The more things change, the more they remain the same, however. In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad told Columbia university that there are no homosexuals in Iran.

It is widely agreed (with mainly Lesbians dissenting) that boys need their fathers. What needs much wider recognition is that girls need their fathers too. The relationship between a "Daddy's girl" and her father is perhaps the most beautiful human relationship there is. It can help give the girl concerned inner strength for the rest of her life.

A modern feminist complains: "We are so far from “having it all” that “we barely even have a slice of the pie, which we probably baked ourselves while sobbing into the pastry at 4am”."

Patriotism does NOT in general go with hostilty towards others. See e.g. here and here and even here ("Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia: A Cross-Cultural Study" by anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan. In Current Anthropology Vol. 42, No. 5, December 2001).

The love of bureaucracy is very Leftist and hence "correct". Who said this? "Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything". It was V.I. Lenin

"An objection I hear frequently is: ‘Why should we tolerate intolerance?’ The assumption is that tolerating views that you don’t agree with is like a gift, an act of kindness. It suggests we’re doing people a favour by tolerating their view. My argument is that tolerance is vital to us, to you and I, because it’s actually the presupposition of all our freedoms. You cannot be free in any meaningful sense unless there is a recognition that we are free to act on our beliefs, we’re free to think what we want and express ourselves freely. Unless we have that freedom, all those other freedoms that we have on paper mean nothing" -- SOURCE

RELIGION:

Although it is a popular traditional chant, the "Kol Nidre" should be abandoned by modern Jewish congregations. It was totally understandable where it originated in the Middle Ages but is morally obnoxious in the modern world and vivid "proof" of all sorts of antisemitic stereotypes

What the Bible says about homosexuality:

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; It is abomination" -- Lev. 18:22

In his great diatribe against the pagan Romans, the apostle Paul included homosexuality among their sins:

"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.... Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them" -- Romans 1:26,27,32.

So churches that condone homosexuality are clearly post-Christian

Although I am an atheist, I have great respect for the wisdom of ancient times as collected in the Bible. And its condemnation of homosexuality makes considerable sense to me. In an era when family values are under constant assault, such a return to the basics could be helpful. Nonetheless, I approve of St. Paul's advice in the second chapter of his epistle to the Romans that it is for God to punish them, not us. In secular terms, homosexuality between consenting adults in private should not be penalized but nor should it be promoted or praised. In Christian terms, "Gay pride" is of the Devil

The homosexuals of Gibeah (Judges 19 & 20) set in train a series of events which brought down great wrath and destruction on their tribe. The tribe of Benjamin was almost wiped out when it would not disown its homosexuals. Are we seeing a related process in the woes presently being experienced by the amoral Western world? Note that there was one Western country that was not affected by the global financial crisis and subsequently had no debt problems: Australia. In September 2012 the Australian federal parliament considered a bill to implement homosexual marriage. It was rejected by a large majority -- including members from both major political parties

Religion is deeply human. The recent discoveries at Gobekli Tepe suggest that it was religion not farming that gave birth to civilization. Early civilizations were at any rate all very religious. Atheism is mainly a very modern development and is even now very much a minority opinion

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" - Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)

I think it's not unreasonable to see Islam as the religion of the Devil. Any religion that loves death or leads to parents rejoicing when their children blow themselves up is surely of the Devil -- however you conceive of the Devil. Whether he is a man in a red suit with horns and a tail, a fallen spirit being, or simply the evil side of human nature hardly matters. In all cases Islam is clearly anti-life and only the Devil or his disciples could rejoice in that.

And there surely could be few lower forms of human behaviour than to give abuse and harm in return for help. The compassionate practices of countries with Christian traditions have led many such countries to give a new home to Muslim refugees and seekers after a better life. It's basic humanity that such kindness should attract gratitude and appreciation. But do Muslims appreciate it? They most commonly show contempt for the countries and societies concerned. That's another sign of Satanic influence.

And how's this for demonic thinking?: "Asian father whose daughter drowned in Dubai sea 'stopped lifeguards from saving her because he didn't want her touched and dishonoured by strange men'

Islamic terrorism isn’t a perversion of Islam. It’s the implementation of Islam. It is not a religion of the persecuted, but the persecutors. Its theology is violent supremacism.

And where Muslims tell us that they love death, the great Christian celebration is of the birth of a baby -- the monogenes theos (only begotten god) as John 1:18 describes it in the original Greek -- Christmas!

No wonder so many Muslims are hostile and angry. They have little companionship from women and not even any companionship from dogs -- which are emotionally important in most other cultures. Dogs are "unclean"

On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!

Germaine Greer is a stupid old Harpy who is notable only for the depth and extent of her hatreds

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here